My First Business

I remember the day clearly. Summer of 1984. I was 9 years old when my father left his job at Wean United, a steel company in Warren Ohio, to start his own photography studio. I remember that as a parting gift from some of his co-workers, he received a t-shirt that had some snarky remark about entrepreneurship on it. I recall a bunch of cartoon pigs or something like that. It sparked the question to my mother about what the shirt meant. She explained it something like this:

“An Entrepreneur is someone that starts a business on their own that didn’t exist before.”

That was my first exposure to the word. At that point in my life, I’m not sure I’d ever thought about “where companies come from” before. She went on to explain that it was just like my grandfather had done with Hardman Photography. That was a business that I knew. I had a lot of questions about entrepreneurship and since my dad was new to it, and I knew my grandfather had already done it, I decided to wait to ask Grandpa more about it…because I instantly considered him an expert.

The next time I was at my grandparents house, the questions poured out of me. How did you start it? How do people know about it? Who are your customers? Where did you find them? 9-year-old kids are chatty…I was relentless. (My poor grandfather.)

My grandparents house was also their place of business. The home from the outside looked like an unassuming 1-story brick ranch style home on North Road in Howland. From the street…you’d have no idea that it was a business. The upstairs was a normal 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom house. Nothing special…until you went to the basement.

At the bottom of the stairs was a room that was 60ft by 30ft with a 20ft ceiling. This was the studio. The front wall was full of camera gear. Lights. Strobes. Reflectors. Cranes. All of the things you think of that would need to be in a 1980’s photography studio. Then, there was another short flight of stairs down farther yet.

These stairs led to the “lower basement” where there were 4 dark-rooms, a retouching area full of drafting tables, and an office desk. (I can still smell it if I close my eyes.) Further back was another large room that was full of woodworking equipment that he’d use to build things related to the business.

I’d known every inch of that house my whole life but right then and there, it all started to make sense. My grandfather had not only built a business, but he’d also made it his home too. Grandpa was WAY ahead of the WFH game.

Back to my Dad’s business for a minute. While he couldn’t build the massive studio that my grandfather had, he’d been building our house for the previous year out of an old barn, and we had one darkroom and some of the same stuff that my Grandfather had. I started to see similarities here and there. Wait…this is a family business! (Does this mean I need to be a photographer too?)

Over the next few years, I watched my father’s business grow. I’d see familiar logos in the house often for brands and companies that he was working with. I’d see my grandfather over on occasion to help out, and we’d sometimes go to his house to help him as well. I was along for the ride for all of it. As I got a little older, I’d help out in the darkroom too developing negatives with them. (Although, I’m not sure they ever actually gave me anything important to work on.) So if I wind back in time, I think my first “job” was processing E6 and C41 in my grandfather’s basement. I seem to remember getting $0.50 a roll.

We’re going to fast-forward here a little bit to high school. I was 14 years old and a freshman. Back then, I was REALLY into car stereos. The first time I heard a set of 12” MTX subwoofers in the back of my friend’s car…I was hooked. But I was only 14 years old, and there was no way I’d have a car anytime soon. (Especially with my grades!) But I wanted to be in the game somehow. I’d hang out with my friends, and we’d pour over issues of Car Stereo Review or Car Audio and Electronics and pine over the ads for Alpine, Kicker, Orion, and HiFonics. Man…that’d be a cool business.

My grandmother, who we called Bacie, was watching me read over magazine after magazine one day when I was pretending to be too sick to go to school and got dropped off at her house. She said to me: “Maybe some day you can open your own car stereo store?” to which I replied “You and Grandpa don’t have a store. Why can’t I do it out of the house like you do?” I had called her bluff. 20 minutes later, we were on our way to the Trumbull County courthouse for me to get my first business license. It cost $7.

Bacie told me the next step was to find a distributer. I couldn’t just call Alpine and have them send me product. She explained the concept of a wholesaler to me, and that got me flustered. The internet wasn’t even a dream at this point, and there wasn’t any book about what I was trying to do, so I had to get creative. I asked her to take me to a local place that sold car stereos. Phase II Electronics on 422 in Warren. When we got there, I had her pull around back. I think she thought I had the bravado to walk right up and ask who their supplier was, but I had a different plan.

I went straight to the dumpster.

I knew that there had to be a catalog or a phone number somewhere in there. This was how I was going to figure it out. Dumpster diving. I’m sure I was in there an uncomfortable amount of time for my then 60-year-old grandmother to be standing as look-out for her grandson who was currently upside down in a dumpster in a shady part of Warren, but I got it. I saw a catalog for The Wholesale House in Hicksville Ohio. (I’m not making that up.) It was a white, yellow and red catalog…and it had everything in it I was looking for.

As we drove back to her house, she explained to me that we’d need to get me set up with a bank account too. So we stopped at Trumbull Savings & Loan on the way home. She floated me the $20 to open an account and co-signed for me. The deal was that only she could write the checks. I was ok with that. I didn’t even have a signature yet.

We got back to the house just in time for Mom to pick me up to see if I was feeling better. (cough-cough) A wink and a hug to Bacie later and I was headed home with my future in my backpack. As soon as I got home, I called TW House and told them I was opening a business and needed an account and a catalog. They asked me for my business license (check) and what bank I had an account with (check) and within the next few days, I had DOZENS of catalogs and HUNDREDS of sales slicks delivered to the house. Holy shit…I was really doing this!

The next lesson from Bacie was about pricing. I wanted to sell cheaper than the store did, but I also wanted to make a profit. So she showed me how to figure out margins and explained the process to me. MSRP was one thing…my cost another…profit is the delta between what I buy for and what I sell for. It clicked instantly. WAY faster than any math teacher at Howland High could have explained it to me. (This is where passion trumps teachers for me every day of the week…sorry teachers.) I figured that if I could make $50 on a head unit, and $25 on speakers, I’d average $100-$200 per car. Then I’d charge for installation. (Which I had no idea how to do.) That’s BIG money for a 14-year-old kid in 1989.

But where would I market? How would I do this part? I had a supplier. I had a business. Now how do I GET business. The obvious (to me) idea was to print flyers and put them on every car in the parking lot at the high school…but only the cool cars. (This was a failure in vision for me…I should have put them on every car.) I didn’t have a phone number that I could answer as a business, but I did have a locker. So that was what I did. “If you’re looking for a new car stereo or speakers, leave a note for D’s Electronics in locker #621. Best prices. Not used.” (I thought that unless I specified that it wasn’t used, people would assume that I was just stealing car stereos, so that was an important part of the sales pitch.)

Nothing happened for a week. Nothing at all. I don’t know what I was expecting, but my message didn’t hit with anyone…until it did. I suddenly had a note in my locker from a guy named Steve that had an 83 Buick Regal that wanted a “booming system” and he left his phone number. I RACED home to call him. I introduced myself and we made a plan to meet at school the next day to discuss his options. I brought nice sales slicks to school the next morning and told him that I could have everything in a few days. To my surprise, he agreed! My first sale. I made my $50 on the head unit, and made another $75 on the speakers. $25 on the amp, and ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS for installation.

Ok, so now, it’s real. Like, really real. This older kid had a car and cash and was going to be my first customer. I took his cash, had Mom take me to the bank to get a money order for the COD, and then placed the order. Shipping was only going to take a day because they were shipping out of Ohio, so I’d be installing my first car stereo that weekend. Guess I’d better learn how to install car stereos!

Time to admit some things. At that point in my life, I’d gotten very good at REMOVING car stereos from unsuspecting owner’s vehicles…quickly…on several opportunistic occasions, but I’d never put one IN a car. I was young, stupid, and lived in a city where crime and gangs were a thing. I’d never joined a gang, but I’d been hanging out with what we’d call “thugs” today for a while. That’s exactly where the guy that had the system that had intoxicated me with his bass had gotten his car stereo. I was trying to go legit here. I didn’t want to end up in jail. (More on that in another post.)

So I called the one guy I knew that could help me out in this situation. His name was Wally, and he knew everything about car stereo installation…at least that’s what I assumed. (Turned out to be right about that.) He walked me through some of the basics, and told me where to look for certain things and how to get through this without looking like a total bafoon.

Parts showed up and so did Steve, right on time to drop off his car. I spent the next 3 hours sweating bullets that I was doing everything right. I got the hang of things pretty quickly. This wasn’t so hard. I was swapping out old crappy speakers for nice new ones. 5” mids with tweeters up front, some 6x9s in the back, and an amp with a 12” sub in the trunk. Easy enough. The amp wasn’t so bad, and the sub box came pre-built. Head unit installation wasn’t overly complicated and everything looked great when I was done. Moment of truth…time to turn it on.

It sounded like shit. Seriously bad. It was loud, sure. But nothing was crisp, and you couldn’t hear a word that was being said. Just as I was finding this out, Steve showed back up to check how much longer it’d be. He walked up to the car with a big ole smile on his face. Said he could hear it from the street and was super happy. I was shocked. I thought it sounded terrible, but it was shaking his windows and he was a happy camper. I wanted to offer to refund his money, or ask for more time, but I didn’t know how I WOULD fix the problem if I had the chance.

As I stood there with my jaw on the ground as he left my driveway happy as hell booming all the way down the street, I’d accomplished two things. 1: I had made my first sale. 2: I had not burned up any electronics in the installation. (I’d later learned why it sounded like shit, and remedied the issue with a simple click of a switch on the amp’s crossover…not that he cared.)

I think I sold 10 car stereos my freshman year. This made my school year much easier because I wasn’t being picked on for being short and skinny. I was the cool kid that could get you a deal on a car stereo.

You’d think I’d have a great ending to this story and that this was the beginning of some great enterprise. You’d be wrong. This is the point where drugs and alcohol took over in a big way.

And that tees up the next post…